Flat-pack furniture, ranked by emotional torture
When was the last time you went and picked up or bought a piece of furniture that was, well, in one piece? Think carefully: something that involved no Allen keys, no drills, no perplexing how-to guides full of hieroglyphs. It was a long time ago, wasn’t it?
Flat-packed (or at least semi-flat) furniture isn’t new, but as companies other than Ikea have realised they can charge less (and sell more) by having the plebs take the pieces home and deal with it out of the earshot of customer assistance, flat-pack has become the norm rather than the Swedish exception to it.
As we all know, however, the alleged ease of construction of most flat-packed furniture is one of modern life’s great falsehoods. So, if you’re planning on doing a little DIY-lite this weekend or next, read on for our definitive ranking of flatpack nightmares, from “walk in the park” to “unrelenting psychic agony”.
5. Tables
What are you complaining about? A table is quite literally, no matter how groovy the design, a flat thing with four legs, which can be flipped over immediately after the legs have been attached. If you can’t stick a table together – the flat-pack/DIY equivalent of a child drawing a house – then you need to have a good, hard look at yourself.
4. Bookshelves
Depending on how many individual shelves (or “cubes”) your bookshelf includes, the only time things may start to get hairy is once you’ve put the thing together and then realised you need to move it into place: there’s nothing like labouring underneath a “5×5″ bookshelf-cum-room-divider to really bring things, such as your life flashing before your eyes, into sharp focus.
3. Wardrobes
Putting together a flat-packed wardrobe is enough to send any adult screaming to their local op-shop’s furniture section to pick up whichever wardrobe is available. They’re big, heavy, full of drawers (see below) and other fiddly bits, and need to be set up in the bedroom in order to avoid having to lug the thing through the house, which inevitably means a crushing sense of claustrophobia sets in rapidly as you attempt to drill shelves together in between your bed and the wall.
2. Chests Of Drawers/Dressers
My housemate recently decided to splash out on what she thought were some easy-to-put-together, very stylish sets of drawers for her room. She put aside an afternoon to assemble them, only to find herself still being tormented by the inscrutable illustrations in the instructions a week later. Anything with drawers means you’re at the mercy of sliding pieces and ball-bearings and all manner of things that, really, seem like they wouldn’t be out of place on an industrial design final exam.
1. Shelving Units / ‘Storage Solutions’
These things are like bookshelves decided you had personally insulted their family, and vowed to make the rest of your life a living hell by expanding in every direction. They’re shelves with drawers and spaces for “entertainment units” and the like, and they’re inevitably the size of an entire wall. Don’t believe me? There’s an Ikea storage unit whose construction is such a Sisyphean nightmare that it’s been dubbed “the divorce-maker“. By the time you finish one of these monsters (or rather, if you ever finish it), you might have saved a few bucks off the shelf price, but you’ll have racked up thousands of dollars worth of future therapy bills.
Source: www.domain.com.au
